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~ CAN STIll remember the excitement, back in 1957, when Russia launched

the first artificial satellites and managed to hang a few pounds of

instruments up here above the atmosphere. Of course, I was only a kid

at the time, but I went out in the evening like everyone else, trying

to spot those little magnesium spheres as they zipped through the

twilight sky hundreds of miles above my head. It's strange to think

that some of them are still there but that now they're below me, and

I'd have to look down toward Earth if I wanted to see them.... Yes, a

lot has happened in the last forty years, and sometimes I'm afraid that

you people down on Earth take the space stations for granted,

forgetting the skill and science and courage that went to make them.

How often do you stop to think that all your long-distance phone calls,

and most of your TV programs, are routed through one or the other of

the satellites! And how often do you give any credit to the

meteorologists up here for the fact that weather forecasts are no

longer the joke they were to our grandfathers, but are dead accurate

ninety-nine per cent of the time?

It was a rugged life, back in the seventies, when I went up to work on

the outer stations. They were being rushed into operation to open up

the millions of new TV and radio circuits which would be available as

soon as we had transmitters out in space that could beam programs to

anywhere on the globe.

The first artificial satellites had been very close to Earth but the

three stations forming the great triangle of the Relay Chain had to be

twenty-two thousand miles up, spaced equally around the equator. At

this altitude and at no other they would take exactly a day to go

around their orbit, and so would stay poised forever over the same spot

on the turning Earth.

In my time I've worked on all three of the stations, but my first tour

of duty was aboard Relay Two. That's almost exactly over Entebbe,

Uganda, and provides service for Europe, Africa, and most of Asia.

Today it's a huge structure hundreds of yards across, beaming thousands

of simultaneous programs down to the hemisphere beneath it as it

carries the radio traffic of half the world. But when I saw it for the

first time from the port of the ferry rocket that carried me up to

orbit, it looked like a junk pile adrift in space. Prefabricated parts

were floating around in hopeless confusion, and it seemed impossible

that any order could ever emerge from this chaos.

Accommodation for the technical staff and assembling crews was

primitive, consisting of a few unserviceable ferry rockets that had

been stripped of everything except air purifiers.

"The Hulks," we christened them; each man had just enough room for

himself and a couple of cubic feet of personal belongings. There was a

fine irony in the fact that we were living in the midst of infinite

space and hadn't room to swing a cat.

It was a great day when we heard that the first pressurized living

quarters were on their way up to us complete with needle jet shower

baths that would operate even here, where water like everything else

had no weight. Unless you've lived aboard an overcrowded spaceship,

you won't appreciate what that meant. We could throw away our damp

sponges and feel really clean at last.... Nor were the showers the only

luxury promised us. On the way up from Earth was an inflatable lounge

spacious enough to hold no fewer than eight people, a microfilm

library, a magnetic billiard table, lightweight chess sets, and similar

novelties for bored spacemen. The very thought of all these comforts

made our cramped life in the Hulks seem quite unendurable, even though

we were being paid about a thousand dollars a week to endure it.

Starting from the Second Refueling Zone, two thousand miles above

Earth, the eagerly awaited ferry rocket would take about six hours to

climb up to us with its precious cargo. I was off duty at the time,

and stationed myself at the telescope where I'd spent most of my scanty

leisure. It was impossible to grow tired of exploring the great world

hanging there in space beside us; with the highest power of the

telescope, one seemed to be only a few miles above the surface. When

there were no clouds and the seeing was good, objects the size of a

small house were easily visible. I had never been to Africa, but I

grew to know it well while I was off duty in Station Two. You may not

believe this, but I've often spotted elephants moving across the

plains, and the immense herds of zebras and antelopes were easy to see

as they flowed back and forth like living tides on the great

reservations.

But my favorite spectacle was the dawn coming up over the mountains in

the heart of the continent. The line of sunlight would come sweeping

across the Indian Ocean, and the new day would extinguish the tiny,

twinkling galaxies of the cities shining in the darkness below me. Long

before the sun had reached the lowlands around them, the peaks of

Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya would be blazing in the dawn, brilliant

stars still surrounded by the night. As the sun rose higher, the day

would march swiftly down their slopes and the valleys would fill with

light. Earth would then be at its first quarter, waxing toward full.

Twelve hours later, I would see the reverse process as the same

mountains caught the last rays of the setting sun. They would blaze

for a little while in the narrow belt of twilight; then Earth would

spin into darkness, and night would fall upon Africa.

It was not the beauty of the terrestrial globe I was concerned with

now. Indeed, I was not even booking at Earth, but at the fierce

blue-white star high above the western edge of the planet's disk.

The automatic freighter was eclipsed in earth shadow; what I was seeing

was the incandescent flare of its rockets as they drove it up on its

twenty-thousand-mile climb.

I had watched ships ascending to us so often that I knew every stage of

their maneuver by heart.

So when the rockets didn't wink out, but continued to burn steadily, I

knew within seconds that something was wrong. In sick, helpless fury I

watched all our 10nged-for comforts and, worse still, our mail! moving

faster and faster along the unintended orbit. The freighter's

autopilot had jammed; had there been a human pilot aboard, he could

have overridden the controls and cut the motor, but now all the fuel

that should have driven the ferry on its two-way trip was being burned

in one continuous blast of power.

By the time the fuel tanks had emptied, and that distant star had

flickered and died in the field of my telescope, the tracking stations

had confirmed what I already knew. The freighter was moving far too

fast for Earth's gravity to recapture it indeed, it was heading into

the cosmic wilderness beyond Pluto.... It took a long time for morale

to recover, and it only made matters worse when someone in the

computing section worked out the future history of our errant

freighter. You see, nothing is ever really lost in space. Once you've

calculated its orbit, you know where it is until the end of eternity.

As we watched our lounge, our library, our games, our mail receding to

the far horizons of the solar system, we knew that it would all come

back one day in perfect condition. If we have a ship standing by it

will be easy to intercept it the second time it comes around the

sun~uite early in the spring of the year A.D. 15,862.